11/18/2007

BREAKING EARTH NEWSBANGLADESHA NATIONAL CALAMITY: 7 million affected by storm.Image: A man sits on a dead cow as he collects cattle corpses from a canal in Taful of Bagherhat district on the south coast of Bangladesh, two days after Cyclone Sidr devastated parts of the country. (AFP Photo: Jewel Samad)

Officials say up to 10,000 people are dead and millions homeless and hungry in cyclone-hit Bangladesh, as the army and aid workers battled to reach the devastated coast.

Three days after cyclone Sidr tore into one of the world's poorest nations from the Bay of Bengal, rescue workers were still fighting their way through a landscape of flattened villages and traumatised crowds.

The chairman of the Bangladeshi Red Crescent Society, the country's central humanitarian organisation, said 3,000 bodies had already been recovered.

RELATED NEWS

Cyclone Sidr an 'ecological disaster'Dhaka - Experts said Sunday they feared for the wildlife and ecology of the world's biggest mangrove forest after a deadly cyclone tore through the Sunderbans - home to the endangered Royal Bengal tiger.

Zunayed Kabir Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based mangrove expert, said he feared thousands of deer as well as many tigers and wild boar had been swept away by the massive tidal wave triggered by cyclone Sidr last Thursday.

"The eye of the cyclone hit the part of the Sunderbans which is known to be the most important habitat of the tigers and other wildlife," he said.